A major feature was recently incorporated into AxRTM allowing for the propagation of seismic waves in anisotropic media. In seismic jargon, the anisotropy is widely known as tilted transverse isotropy (TTI) whereby the axis of symmetry for wave propagation can have arbitrary tilt which usually corresponds with the dip angle of geological substructures.
Starting to work in a new team of high-performance computing developers and researchers is like going skydiving. To go skydiving, you first would like to go to skydiving school so that you can at least survive your first skydive. This is where those university years and CUDA courses taught by experienced people become very handy; by no means I am saying that you cannot learn CUDA, skydiving, or anything else on your own but I am saying that with proper training, new abilities can be learned safely and quickly. Once you have all of your training, you go out to jump off as many flying apparatus as you can find; keeping in mind that all you have is training and very little experience. With time, practice, and lots of patience you master your skills; regardless in the air or in front of your computer. The experience that you gather does not make you invulnerable to all the problems that can occur during a skydive or while developing software, but your experience teaches you how you can deal effectively with the many problems that can occur; in skydiving - line over malfunctions, line twists, horseshoe malfunctions, pilot chutes in tow, and in developing high performance software memory leaks, logic errors, race conditions, and problems parallelizing serial algorithms.
Watch Mike Weldon introducing Acceleware's FDTD solution and it's practical applications:
January 31: So I ended up in Zhuozhou City about 120km from Beijing this week as a guest of the Geophysical Research Institute (GRI). I have trouble following the connection chart, and it changes, but to make a long, convoluted story seem short: it seems like the path is China National Petroleum Company (CNPC), which is then connected to PetroChina, which is then or also connected to the Bureau of Geophysical Processing (BGP), which is then the parent of GRI. GRI is the seismic processing workhorse and I think they do most of the seismic processing for the Chinese oilfields/companies. They do a lot of international work as well.
Seismic migration images the subsurface by propagating a wave into the Earth and listening for the reflections that return to the surface. Like any waves, the major properties of seismic waves are speed, frequency and wavelength. Seismic wave speed is largely determined by the type of rock it is traveling through, as well as how much pressure that rock is under. Wave speeds in rock typically vary from 3000 m/s to 6000 m/s, which is up to 20 times the speed of sound in air. The frequency of the wave is determined by a few factors, but mostly by the type of energy that is injected at the surface and how well that energy travels through the rock (the dispersive nature of the rock). At the end of the day, usable seismic frequencies recorded at the surface are usually between 20Hz and 60Hz.
Back when I competed in programming contests, problems would be wrapped up in “real-world” stories, with the goal of making the problem easier to comprehend and more digestible for larger audiences. Following such tradition (hopefully), I present a story about a common problem developers deal with here at Acceleware.
The Oil and Gas team just delivered on a project with Saudi Aramco, and it's my job to acknowledge (immortalize) the team's success by blogging about it. The project objective was to redevelop the customer's production Kirchhoff Time Migration codes (KTM, the "workhorse" algorithm in the seismic processing industry) to exploit heterogonous multi-core hardware, or in plain language, computer clusters equipped with GPUs and modern CPUs. Note that I didn't say port.
I have just gotten my first filtered seismic image using prediction error filters (PEFs), so I thought I should share this experience with our Acceleware blog readers. Coming from electromagnetic field modeling, I have quite a bit of experience with wave propagation through different types of materials. However, image filtering is a whole new (and interesting) world to me.
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